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The traditional Unix utility uses options and arguments to parse command line parms that dictate how the utility should work. Long options is one way to make a utility's usage somewhat natural; for example: util --version. Some utilities use keywords and command/sub-command syntax. It is possible to combine the two without causing too much confusion.

"It contains lots of scheduler updates from lots of people - hopefully the last big one for quite some time," began Ingo Molnar,describing his merge request for thelinux-2.6-sched git tree. He continued,"most of the focus was on performance (both micro-performance and scalability/balancing), but there's the fair-scheduling feature now Kconfig selectable too. Find the shortlog below." Ingo noted,"code that is touched outside of the scheduler: the KVM bits were acked by Avi, the net/unix change is trivial and only affects sync wakeups, ditto the fs/pipe.c changes - but i can push those separately if it needs an ack from David first."

The developerWorks website, with the help of the Krugle search engine has made available over 33,000 individual code files. This reflects over 4.6 million lines of code from over 35 programming languages including C, XML, Java, AJAX, ADA, C++, Perl, Ruby, Cobol, Fortran and many others.

Dvorak recently claimed that the Free Software Foundation spearheads the non-commercial use group that believes "nobody should ever make any money selling or using software." Boy, did he ever miss the boat. But the fact is that some people in the community seem to believe exactly that.

Former Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony has shown all the loyalty of a free agent athlete. Just a few months after resigning from Linspire, Carmony has traded in his old company's Linux operating system for Ubuntu.

The concept of a Electronic Medical Record (EMR) 'source code escrow' had to be dreamed up by proprietary EMR marketing departments. Source code escrows give a false sense of security and confuse buyers from getting the real thing: Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) licensed EMR software. Source code escrows sound good on the surface but even a cursory examination reveals many practical flaws. A source code escrow is defined by Wikipedia as a:"...deposit of the source code of the software into an account held by a third party escrow agent. Escrow is typically requested by a party licensing software (the licensee), to ensure maintenance of the software. The software source code is released to the licensee if the licensor files for bankruptcy or otherwise fails to maintain and update the software as promised in the software license agreement."

I've been pacing the chumby maternity ward for nearly a year, waiting for this unique wireless device to see the light of day. I recently took delivery of my own little bundle of chumby joy and, at first look, I think it will make a great addition to my growing gadget family.

For those who are tired of cleaning out an inbox full of junk, Roaring Penguin's latest anti-spam software has been released. Although it isn't open source, as the Penguin-based company name might suggest, there is a version for small enterprises which can be used free of charge.

Ubuntu 7.10 arrives Oct. 18, and not long after that Dell will start shipping that version of the Ubuntu Linux desktop on its laptops and desktops. "We will offer Ubuntu 7.10 preinstalled on our systems soon," said Anne Camden of Dell corporate communications, in an e-mail interview. "For customers who are interested in updating their existing Ubuntu systems, we advise them to visit the Ubuntu 7.10 page on our wiki, which will go live [Oct. 18] after the official launch."

Former Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony was pretty gung-ho about the company's upcoming release back in June. He said it would "fill some key holes in our current offering." Unfortunately Linspire 6, released last week, lacks the refinements you'd expect in a distro you pay $50 to download. It drops some key distinguishing features, and in return gains only some Microsoft technology as spelled out in the Microsoft patent covenants Linspire agreed to. This release seems to be about deferring to Microsoft.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, will announce its third annual desktop Linux survey on Oct. 17. This survey is not designed to measure how popular the Linux desktop is or how popular one desktop distribution is over another, although it will also measure some of that kind of information. What the survey is really designed to do is to pinpoint areas of user need in order to focus development efforts and accelerate the global adoption of Linux desktops and clients.

Linux vendor Novell is heading off after the small business sector now with its latest release, the Novell Open Workgroup Suite Small Business Edition (say that in one breath). The suite is a desktop-to-server setup that the company says is tailored to meet the needs of small businesses.

Theoretically, search engines should find all the best Web sites and rank them at the top of their search results. Unfortunately, due to the gap between artificial and human intelligence, this doesn't always happen. Users have the ability to alter the rankings by doing search engine optimization (SEO) -- a two-edged sword that can either be beneficial or harmful, depending on whose hands it's in. You can improve your site's search-engine rankings by using free or open source software (FOSS) tools for SEO.

One of the biggest gripes the FOSS community has with respect to Microsoft's business tactics is that its longstanding exclusionary agreements with hardware vendors has stifled genuine competition. This is the very issue of one of two claims Novell will be allowed to press against Microsoft in their anti-trust lawsuit.

In a surprising announcement, which will no doubt stir up the open source community, the Open Source Initiative said that it had approved two of Microsoft's licences as being fit for open source software.